


The Last Words of Bad Wolf

by fannishliss



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: s01e13 The Parting of the Ways, F/M, Soul Bond, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-24 06:56:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/631665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss/pseuds/fannishliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a deep exploration of the canon scene in "Parting of the Ways" between The Doctor and Rose Tyler, the Bad Wolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Words of Bad Wolf

**The Last Words of Bad Wolf**  
Rose/Nine, G, 2200 words  
scene from Parting of the Ways: canon-compliant = angst

The very sweet [](http://miranda-askher.livejournal.com/profile)[**miranda_askher**](http://miranda-askher.livejournal.com/) wanted [something about what The Bad Wolf says to the Doctor right before she faints](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/135130.html?thread=1289946#t1289946).  I went back and watched PotW very closely, and I saw, that yes, Rose's lips move right before she faints.  Also, I saw what I'd never noticed before, which is that Rose completely dissolves into Vortex energy and is reassembled— which I can't believe isn't made a bigger deal in every single discussion of Rose and her ultimate fate.  

This is an angsty canon-compliant exploration.   If you'd like my happy ending AU take on this same set of events, read "[Her Golden Fire](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/94450.html)."

 

 

\---  
  
The Doctor closed his eyes and surrendered himself, waiting with a kind of relief for the Daleks to decide his fate.  

Then he heard the sound he'd resigned himself to never hearing again — the beloved sound of his Tardis materializing.  But how?

He whirled as the Daleks panicked around him. The Tardis door opened and tendrils of golden light erupted from within.  

He fell back in shock and horror.  Somehow, the Tardis had been breached, and the unmediated light of the Vortex itself was pouring out, mere feet in front of him.  He remembered the mind-bending terror of the untempered Schism, all those years ago — this was so much more intense than that.  Every possibility, every impossibility, swirled in the chaotic glow his Tardis had unleashed.

And from that ultimate primordium, stepped Rose.  

He fell back, even more alarmed at the thought of what it would do to her — Rose — he'd sent her away with the Tardis to keep her safe, back into the past − but somehow, here she was, in the most unsafe conditions he could ever have dreamed up in his worst nightmare — surrounded by Daleks -- wreathed in the untamed fires of Vortex energy.

Aghast, he lay on the deck and watched as Rose momentarily flickered out of existence, only to coalesce back into her familiar form a little closer to him.  She had been completely infused with Vortex energy—her very being was now enmeshed in the uncontrollable surges and eruptions of pure unfettered Time— the one thing Time Lords feared more than anything else in the universe, the very forces they'd tried with so much hubris to harness during the War, with devastating consequences.  

"What have you done?" he yelled.  Anger, fear, sorrow, all tore through him at the sight of Rose's tear-stained face, haloed in gold.

"I looked into the Tardis," Rose said. Her voice sounded weak, and the Doctor could hear the ripples of Time distorting the sound as the Vortex shuffled her existence minutely out of synch with the normative vibrations of the universe around her.  "And the Tardis looked into me."

"You looked into the Time Vortex!  Rose, no one's meant to see that!"  It was untrammeled chaos, order stewed with abomination, quasi-reality flickering with every possibility, a Shrödinger's universe of simultaneous potentiality and nullity: impossible for the sane mind to safely observe.

"I am the Bad Wolf," Rose said calmly.  "I create myself."

The Doctor couldn't argue— with his own eyes he'd just seen Rose vanish and reappear within the temporal plasma swirling all around her and partially emanating from her.  Her beautiful brown eyes gleamed with the unnatural glow.  

"Rose, you've got to stop this," he shouted helplessly.  "You've got to stop this now.  You've got the entire Vortex running through your head — you're gonna burn!"

There was no sign yet that she was in danger — but how could she not be?  No Time Lord could withstand these forces— and Rose was merely human.  Or was she?  Had she, in paradoxical truth, created herself, able to survive this very moment? The Doctor remembered the Abominations of the Time War, their horrid circular acausal wrongness.  But Rose seemed whole, volitional, so powerful, and so very beautiful — a goddess of Time.   He had just seen her scatter the letters of the Bad Wolf Corporation sign, literally dismantling them and somehow dispatching them backwards and throughout time as a message to herself.  Who could say how far her power might extend?  

And what about the Tardis?  Was the Tardis somehow assisting her? Had his sentient ship somehow helped Rose access the Vortex?   It was just the kind of impossible thing the Tardis did easily every day.

Rose looked down at him, emotion coming into her voice even as the eerie light momentarily left her eyes.  "I want you safe — my Doctor— " she said.  

It was just like Rose, the Doctor thought with a pang, to be concerned for his safety in such a moment, when she was in such grave danger. Even if she didn't burn in the time fires, she might wink out at any moment, and there was no way to predict when or if she might reoccur.

"Protected from the False God," she said, and the Doctor once more wondered if the Tardis was somehow involved, because Rose would never have uttered such a phrase of her own accord.  

Then, just as easily as she had blocked a Dalek's deadly ray, Rose lifted her arm, and with power erupting from within her, she began to dismantle the Daleks —not just at the atomic level, but as the Doctor could sense, she wiped them away from Time itself, undoing their very existence.  The Doctor had never seen Time wielded with such deadly precision, even at the War's worst.

"Everything must come to dust," Rose said, voice ringing with compassionate sorrow.  "All things — everything dies.  The Time War ends."

"Destroyer of worlds" the Daleks had named him.  What would they have named her, his precious Rose, if they could have predicted their unraveling?  

He would have done anything to spare her the weight of this burden, ridding the universe of its plague of Daleks.  How much had she unraveled along with them? There was no way to know.  This Bad Wolf entity had become something so subtle, so discreet, that the Doctor could barely feel the ripples she had made in undoing his most deadly enemy. What had she become in the process?   The Time War had changed the Doctor, scarred his very heart and soul, ruthlessly reshaping a playful wizard into a deadly warrior.  Now, Rose had taken up that mantle, placing it on her own shoulders. The Daleks had threatened him and she had destroyed them utterly.    He would have sacrificed anything to spare her that terrible burden— he had, in fact, offered up not only himself, but even the very future of the human race. How would she recover her joy, her innocence, after this?   And she'd done it all, for him —  she'd put him first; somehow, she thought he was worth it. All she would suffer on his behalf — it was more than he could bear.  

"Rose, you've done it, now stop. Just let go," he begged. Her face was stained with the tracks of tears.

"How can I let go of this?" she said.  Her voice was weakening, and her next words frightened him even more.

"I bring life," she said, and the Doctor felt something, somewhere reverse itself, tearing a minute but dire chasm in the natural order.  

"This is wrong!" he screamed.  "You can't control life and death!"

"But I can," she suddenly answered, looking down at him with her own human eyes — those same eyes that had pinned him with such confusion and accusation when her own father's life had hung in the balance.

"The sun and the moon, the day and night," Rose intoned, a bitter goddess.  The contradictions were building up inside her.  As a rational, finite being, Rose couldn't contain the legion of mutiplicities that were vying inside her now, attempting to burst into reality through her volition.  

He stared up at her, wracking his brain for some way to bring her safely out of it.  If only the Tardis could regain control of the Vortex energy, pull it back somehow —

—if the Tardis couldn't, he'd have to do it himself.

And there was absolutely no possibility he'd survive it.

"But why does it hurt?" Rose cried.

The Doctor trembled as he fought conflicting urges — to seize Rose and fling her back into his Tardis — to run from the chaos that threatened to tear his Time Lord senses from his brain and fling them in shreds to the random corners of the universe — to find some way, any way, to save the woman he loved from the enormity of her own unselfish actions.  But right now, at this moment, she was the most powerful being in the universe — far more powerful than he'd ever been — and whatever she wanted to happen, that was the way events would play out.

If she valued his life over her own, then he would live and she would die. He had dared to love her, she had loved him back, and now she was paying for it — one more crime on his already guilty conscience.

"The power's gonna kill you and it's my fault," he wept.

"I can see everything," she said, gently, even as her voice had gone high with pain.  "All that is, all that was."

She was talking about his own life, he realized:  his own choices, the perils and dangers and exploits and follies that made up the renegade Time Lord who cowered beneath her.

"All that ever could be," she said, and her words shivered through him like inspiration, or dream, or folly.  Could it be, that she could see a future, a real potentiality? The trace of hope and comfort in her voice bore him up.  Maybe she could see it. Maybe he, a coward, could be brave. He pulled himself to his feet, for her.

"That's what I see, all the time — doesn't it drive you mad?"   Weighing the endless calculations, watching the births and untimely deaths of so many possibilities— many a greater Time Lord than he had sunk down incapacitated by far less than this.

"My head — it's killing me," Rose cried in pain.

"Come here," he said.  "You need a Doctor."

He pulled Rose against him and tasted her sweet, soft lips for the first and last time.  He felt the Vortex catching hold of him, latching on to the aspects of his Time Lord physiology that had been engineered for that purpose since the days of Rassilon.  Time Lords, he thought crazily, were the lice of the Vortex, crawling minutely over its grandeur, sucking its energy into themselves for their own puny purposes. The power in the Bad Wolf was on another scale altogether — it would flow out of her, into him,  whether or not he could survive the deluge.  

But she had said "all that ever could be" -- she had seen it.  He had no other option but to trust.

"Doctor," he felt her murmur in his mind, from somewhere inside the Vortex flowing out of her into him.   

"Yes," he answered, drinking her in, loving her, molding himself to her for all he was worth.

"Doctor, I love you," she whispered.

"How can you?" he asked, hopelessly.

"I see everything, everything you've done, everything you will do, and I love you so much," she said.  The brilliance of her love shone clearly into his mind, brighter by far than the glister of the Vortex.  

"Rose, Rose," he thought desperately, kissing her.  He yearned to enfold her so deeply into himself that even if —when — they were torn apart, he would still feel her presence inside him.    He wanted her to live forever — something humans weren't meant to do.  He wanted her to belong to him, even though he was a torn and broken man, impulsive and changeable.  Guilt seared through him.  He might never be able to give back to her even the slightest portion of all she'd given him.  But he still wanted her.  Despite how hard it was for him to give, he couldn't stop himself from taking.  And somehow, she knew all that.  

"I will never, ever, leave you.  I swear it," Rose sang inside his head, and her words resonated with the powerful reality-defying truth of the Vortex in all its impossibility.

"Never ever leave you," she whispered, her lips just barely moving as she passed out and sank down.

He took the Vortex energy out of Rose and into himself, and he felt the ravages of wildfire crackling and tearing through his body.  Finally it dwindled and he breathed the last of it back into the Tardis.  

The damage the Vortex had done to him hardly mattered, compared to what Rose had done.

He could feel the truth of her words, echoing inside him.  She'd left something of herself, entangled throughout his existence, and now that he knew what she felt like, he realized that she truly had always been with him.  And, he believed, she always would be — that essence of Rose that had created and been created by the Bad Wolf was branded into him now, into his very psyche.  This body was ruined— the arms that had held her, the lips that had kissed her, the hearts that had pounded in time with hers — but his essence remained, intact and now threaded through with the inescapable fact of Rose's love.   

She'd made him the miraculous promise of forever, but he was a dangerous person to be around, and he already knew he'd do anything to keep her safe.  It wasn't fair, to her or to him, but he'd always have some part of her there inside him, to keep him warm when she was gone.

He might deceive her or abandon her; but maybe, he wouldn't outlive her.  For now, that had to be enough.  

 


End file.
